Ugo Morelli Robert Reitherman Interviewer Ugo Morelli Ugo Morelli Robert Reitherman, Interviewer Earthquake Engineering Research Institute Editor: Gail Hynes Shea, Berkeley, California, www.gailshea.com Composition: George Mattingly, Berkeley, California, www.mattinglydesign.com; Book design: Laura Moger, Moorpark, California, www.lauramoger.com Copyright © 2013 by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute The publication of this book was supported by FEMA/U.S. Department of Homeland Security under grant EMW-2012-CA-K00160. Any opinions, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the oral history subject and do not necessarily reflect the views or policies of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute or FEMA/U.S. Department of Homeland Security. All rights reserved. All literary rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute. No part may be reproduced, quoted, or transmitted in any form without the written permission of the executive director of the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute. Requests for permission to quote for publication should include identification of the specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification of the user. Published by the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute 499 14th Street, Suite 220 Oakland, California 94612-1934 Tel: (510) 451-0905 Fax: (510) 451-5411 E-mail: [email protected] Website: http://www.eeri.org EER I Publication Number: OHS-21 ISBN: 978-1-932884-60-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Morelli, Ugo, interviewee. Ugo Morelli / Robert Reitherman, interviewer. pages cm. — (Connections, the EERI oral history series) Includes index. ISBN 978-1-932884-60-9 (pbk.) 1. Morelli, Ugo. 2. United States. Federal Emergency Management Agency--Officials and employees--Biography. 3. Emergency management--United States. 4. Earthquake engineering--United States. I. Reitherman, Robert, 1950– interviewer. II. Title. HV551.M67 2013 354.6’4--dc23 [B] 2013037593 Printed in the United States of America 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 Table of Contents The EERI Oral History Series . vii Foreword. xi Personal Introduction by Diana Todd . xiii Chapter 1 Growing Up in Massachusetts and Italy . 1 Chapter 2 Starting at Harvard, War Approaches . 11 Chapter 3 In the Army During World War II. 15 Chapter 4 Back in the United States for Graduate School and a New Career . 23 Chapter 5 Beginning A Career In Emergency Management. 31 Chapter 6 National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program . 45 Chapter 7 FEMA Program on New Buildings . 61 Chapter 8 FEMA Program on Existing Buildings . 69 Chapter 9 Federal Buildings . 95 Chapter 10 Reflections on a Career in Emergency Management . 121 Chapter 11 At Home . 131 Photographs. 135 Index . 145 v The EERI Oral History Series This is the twenty-first oral history in the Earthquake Engineering Research Institute’s series, Connections: The EERI Oral History Series. EERI began this series to preserve the recollections of some of those who have had pioneering careers in the field of earthquake engineering. Signifi- cant, even revolutionary, changes have occurred in earthquake engineering since indi viduals first began thinking in modern, scientific ways about how to protect construction and society from earthquakes. The Connections series helps document this important history. Connections is a vehicle for transmitting the fascinating accounts of individuals who were present at the beginning of important developments in the field, documenting sometimes little-known facts about this history, and recording their impressions, judgments, and expe- riences from a personal standpoint. These reminiscences are themselves a vital contribu- tion to our understanding of where our current state of knowledge came from and how the overall goal of reducing earthquake losses has been advanced. The Earthquake Engineering Research Institute, incorporated in 1948 as a nonprofit organization to provide an institu- tional base for the then-young field of earthquake engineering, is proud to help tell the story of the development of earthquake engineering through the Connections series. EERI has grown from a few dozen individuals in a field that lacked any significant research funding to an organization with nearly 3,000 members. It is still devoted to its original goal of investi- gating the effects of destructive earthquakes and publishing the results through its recon- naissance report series. EERI brings researchers and practitioners together to exchange information at its annual meetings and, via a now-extensive calendar of conferences and workshops, provides a forum through which individuals and organizations of various disci- plinary backgrounds can work together for increased seismic safety. The EERI oral history program was initiated by Stanley Scott (1921–2002). The first nine volumes were published during his lifetime, and manuscripts and interview transcripts he left to EERI are resulting in the publication of other volumes for which he is being posthu- mously credited. vii The Oral History Committee is including further interviewees within the program’s scope, following the Committee’s charge to include subjects who: 1) have made an outstanding career-long contribution to earthquake engineering, 2) have valuable first-person accounts to offer concerning the history of earthquake engineering, and 3) whose backgrounds, con- sidering the series as a whole, appropriately span the various disciplines that are included in the field of earthquake engineering. Scott’s work, which he began in 1984, summed to hundreds of hours of taped interview sessions and thousands of pages of tran scripts. Were it not for him, valuable facts and recollections would already have been lost. Scott was a research political scientist at the Institute of Governmental Studies at the Uni- versity of California at Berkeley. He was active in developing seismic safety policy for many years, and he was a member of the California Seismic Safety Commission from 1975 to 1993. Partly for that work, he received the Alfred E. Alquist Award from the Earthquake Safety Foundation in 1990. Scott received assistance in formulating his oral history plans from Willa Baum, Director of the University of California at Berkeley Regional Oral History Office, a division of the Ban- croft Library. An unfunded interview project on earthquake engineering and seismic safety was approved, and Scott was encouraged to proceed. Following his retirement from the Uni- versity in 1989, Scott continued the oral history project. For a time, some expenses were paid from a small grant from the National Science Foundation, but Scott did most of the work pro bono. This work included not only the obvious effort of preparing for and conducting the interviews themselves, but also the more time-consuming tasks of reviewing transcripts and editing the manuscripts to flow smoothly. The Connections oral history series presents a selection of senior individuals in earthquake engineering who were present at the beginning of the modern era of that field. The term “earthquake engineering” as used here has the same meaning as in the name of EERI—the broadly construed set of disciplines, including geosciences and social sciences as well as engineering itself, that together form a related body of knowledge and collection of individ- uals that revolve around the subject of earthquakes. The events described in these oral his- tories span many kinds of activities: research, design projects, public policy and broad social aspects, and education, as well as interesting personal aspects of the subjects’ lives. viii Published volumes in Connections: The EERI Oral History Series Henry J. Degenkolb. 1994 John A. Blume . 1994 Michael V. Pregnoff and John E. Rinne . 1996 George W. Housner. 1997 William W. Moore . 1998 Robert E. Wallace . 1999 Nicholas F. Forell . 2000 Henry J. Brunnier and Charles De Maria . .2001 Egor P. Popov . 2001 Clarence R. Allen . 2002 Joseph Penzien. 2004 Robert Park and Thomas Paulay . 2006 Clarkson W. Pinkham . 2006 Joseph P. Nicoletti . 2006 LeRoy Crandall . .2008 Vitelmo V. Bertero . 2009 Robert V. Whitman . 2009 Eric Elsesser . 2010 William Anderson . 2011 Roy G. Johnston . 2012 Ugo Morelli . 2013 EERI Oral History Committee Robert Reitherman, Chair Thalia Anagnos William Anderson Roger Borcherdt Gregg Brandow Robert Hanson Loring Wylie, Jr. ix Foreword The interviews with Ugo Morelli that formed this oral history were conducted between Ugo Morelli and me between 2005 and 2012 in Ugo’s home in Washington, D.C. The review comments of Oral History Committee member William Anderson are gratefully acknowledged, along with the work of Gail Shea, consulting editor to EERI, who carefully reviewed the entire manuscript and prepared the index, as she has on the previous volumes in the series. George Mattingly was responsible for the page layout work. Maggie Ortiz, Program Associate of EERI, also assisted in seeing this publication through to completion. Robert Reitherman Chair, EERI Oral History Committee March 2013 xi Personal Introduction This series of histories published by EERI presents the personal recollections of the giants of earthquake engineering in the 20th century. Engineers and scientists. Great technical minds, one and all. Except for Ugo Morelli. He is not an engineer. He does not have a technical mind. But he is without a doubt one of the greats of the earthquake engineering